It’s time for promoters of international student programs to stop acting as if they are “white knights.”

That’s the view of Hanneke Teekens, one of many scholars studying the so-called “internationalization of higher education” who are growing worried about the ethical pitfalls that have opened up with the meteoric rise in the number of foreign students in the Western world.

Foreign-student programs were largely born out of a humanitarian urge to help the world’s under-privileged, Teekens says. The Dutch expert is not alone in questioning how the phenomenon has turned into a multi-billion dollar business, with the attendant competition and marketing rhetoric.

Her voice is part of a chorus of scholarly criticism from across Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S. Specialists in higher education regret how the flood of foreign students has become a vast commercial enterprise that is plundering students from the developing world and resulting in lower educational standards.

The number of students studying outside their countries has quadrupled in three decades, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

In the past 10 years alone, Canadian colleges and universities have more than doubled their cohort of foreign students to 225,000 in 2011. B.C. campuses get almost three out of 10 of that total.

Higher education experts are urging the many political, academic and corporate leaders who want to attract even more foreign students to tone down their “hype” about how such programs are invariably win-win.

Despite their concerns, higher-education specialists like Teekens believe foreign-student programs should continue — but at a more modest scale and with reforms.

The world’s university systems are in “chaos” because of the global expansion of higher education, says Philip Altbach, director of the Center for Higher Education at Boston College, one of the world’s leading experts.

“In today’s globalized world,” Altbach says, “higher education is big business for many and perhaps three million students study abroad — the large majority coming from Asia and going to the main English-speaking Western countries and Australia.”

Canada top specialist on foreign student programs, Jane Knight, had harsh words about lost idealism when she spoke at a conference at the University of B.C. -- where 12 per cent of undergraduates and more than 33 per cent of graduate students are foreign citizens.

Knight said the values behind the internationalization of higher education have shifted from cooperation to “competition,” from mutual benefit to “self-interest,” from cultural exchange to institutional “prestige-building” and “commercial trade.”

Struggling with public funding crunches, Canadian and other Western colleges and universities are moving into “turbulent times when competitiveness, rankings and commercialism seem to be the driving forces,” said Knight, of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

In Canada, almost 10 per cent of university students are not citizens of this country. These foreign students are estimated to bring in $8 billion a year in higher tuition fees and retail spending.

A rapidly shrinking proportion of these foreign students are impoverished young people supported by bursaries. Today most are from affluent families, especially from East Asia.

Despite experts’ concerns, B.C. Premier Christy Clark and UBC President Stephen Toope are among the host of influential Canadians who are promoting another dramatic increase in foreign students.

Like many university officials and corporate executives, Toope has said he’s “really excited” about making Canada “the first choice” for foreign students, especially from Asia. Toope maintains such “branding” will bring “intercultural understanding” and “a net benefit.”

Canada’s rate of acceptance of foreign students is already roughly four times higher per capita rate than it is the U.S. That Canadian trend is most exaggerated in B.C., which has far more foreign students proportionally than any other province.

It is not clear whether the recent doubling of foreign students has hurt domestic Canadian students’ access to higher education. One rare recent study, by Donald Fisher and Kjell Rubenson of UBC, suggests domestic accessibility has generally not declined in B.C. — but the data stops at 2003.

Fisher and Rubenson say it’s challenging to precisely measure the effects on domestic accessibility of then-premier Gordon Campbell’s drastic hike in tuition fees in 2001, followed by a reduction in loans.

Apart from the under-researched issue of accessibility, a growing list of complaints are emerging from scholars about foreign student programs:

Brain drain and western dominance: The Western world is stripping developing countries of too many of its young, say critics. “Emerging economies are subsidizing the rich countries by educating many through their bachelor’s degree and then losing them,” said Altbach. The established Western university system is increasingly dominating global education.

Bragging rights, with little concern for failures? German specialist Uwe Brandenburg is appalled by universities that boast about their foreign-student numbers. He notes 66 per cent of the out-of-country students in Germany’s engineering programs do not graduate. “Why did we get them in the first place?” He also chides universities for bragging of their high number of “partnerships” with other offshore institutions, saying most “mean nothing.”

Decline in student quality: While university marketers often talk about bringing in “the best and brightest” foreign students, Boston University’s Altbach cautions: “As the number of overseas students has grown, the level of sophistication of the applicants has declined. Many of today’s potential students … want to study abroad because they cannot find access at home.” Surveys also show many students view moving to a foreign country as the first step to a second passport.

“Isolation” and local student resistance: Jane Knight notes foreign students “band together” and often become “isolated” on campuses. “Frequently,” she says, “domestic undergraduate students are known to resist … undertaking joint academic projects or engaging socially with foreign students.” When university administrators preach about “internationalizing” their campus, Knight said their words often “mask” more crass desires to generate revenue or improve rankings.

Outrage in California: Due to severe education cuts, hundreds of thousands of highly eligible residents of California have in recent years been refused entry to the state’s colleges and universities, say scholars. The San Jose Mercury News reported that the 23 Cal State campuses were told not to admit local graduate students last spring — only out-of-state or foreign graduate students, because their tuition fees are not taxpayer-subsidized.

Fraud, cheating and “soft grading”: Some of the world’s leading universities are being caught in unethical behaviour. Knight laments how universities in global “partnerships” are handing out “double degrees” to foreign students for completing a workload equivalent to only one degree. The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology is among those being investigated for rampant “soft marking” of foreign students and encouraging them to cheat and plagiarize.

Pushback in Australia: Australian politicians have been the most audacious at recruiting foreign students — to offset sharply cutting taxpayer support for domestic students. Full-fee-paying foreign students account for 23 per cent of the Australian campus population. But Australians have been pushing back. Given such often-angry opposition, education experts predict Australia is on its way to reducing its foreign student contingent by 40 to 60 per cent.

What does this suggest is ahead for the colleges and universities of Canada?

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